Annual Editions: Computers in Society 06/07

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From McGraw-Hill Contemporary Learning Series (formerly known as McGraw-Hill/Dushkin), this Thirteen Edition of ANNUAL EDITIONS: COMPUTERS IN SOCIETY 06/07 provides convenient, inexpensive access to current articles selected from the best of the public press. Organizational features include: an annotated listing of selected World Wide Web sites; an annotated table of contents; a topic guide; a general introduction; brief overviews for each section; a topical index; and an instructor's resource guide with testing materials. USING ANNUAL EDITIONS IN THE CLASSROOM is offered as a practical guide for instructors. ANNUAL EDITIONS titles are supported by our student website, www.mhcls.com/online.

UNIT 1. Introduction

1. Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change, Neil Postman, Address to New Tech ’98 Conference, March 27, 1998

Neil Postman, a well-known cultural critic, suggests that computer technology is too important to be left entirely to the technologists. “Embedded in every technology,” he says, “is a powerful idea….”

“The United States,” the authors say, “is now in the second stage of a major technological transformation” that is changing American life. Some people are calling for more federal government protection.

3. On the Nature of Computing, Jon Crowcroft, Communications of the ACM, February 2005

This article has a distinctly different tone than the previous piece. The author states, “Occupying a third place in human intellectual culture, computing is not bound by the need to describe what does exist (as in natural science) or what can be built in the real world (as in engineering).”

UNIT 2. The Economy

4. The Productivity Paradox, Stephen S. Roach, The New York Times, November 30, 2003

Ever since some economists began to doubt that computers contribute to a company’s productivity, others have been trying to prove the opposite. Productivity figures for the past couple of years seem to be on the side of computers. Not so fast, says Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley.

5. The Big Band Era, Christopher Swope, Governing, January 2005

Even as cities like Philadelphia are working to transform the entire city into a wireless hot spot—with government as the internet service provider of last resort—communications companies are fighting to keep local governments out of the broadband business.

Of the $35 billion dollars worth of purchases that search engines generated in 2004, Google accounted for a healthy share. This means that a lot of companies are going to pay Google to be included among search results.

7. The Software Wars, Paul De Palma, The American Scholar, Winter 2005

The article argues that software development is like military procurement, and suffers many of the same woes, including excessive complexity and cost overruns.

UNIT 3. Work and the Workplace

Do immigrants displace native workers? Is the United States siphoning off talent from countries that can ill afford to lose it? This Berkeley professor argues that high-skill immigration is more complex than that.

The recession in Silicon Valley has been difficult for many. Santa Clara County, California combines some of the highest unemployment in the country with some of the highest housing prices.

11. When Long Hours at a Video Game Stop Being Fun, Randall Stross, The New York Times, November 21, 2004

Though glamour stories of rich Silicon Valley software engineers don’t figure in the American imagination like they did during the salad days of the dot com boom, one is still not quite prepared for this take of forced overtime.

This article uses data from several surveys “to examine two key aspects of the computer evolution: the spread of PCs at work and the evolving wage differentials between individuals who use them and those who do not.”

UNIT 4. Computers, People, and Social Participation

It should surprise no one that entering freshmen, who grew up using the Internet, should turn to university-sponsored blogs to ease the transition to college life.

15. Structure and Evolution of Blogspace, Ravi Kumar, et al., Communications of the ACM, December 2004

Bloggers in the 19-21 age group tend to be interested in “dorm life, frat parties, college life, my tattoo, pre-med,” while their parents tend to blog about “science fiction, wine, walking, travel, cooking, politics, history, poetry, jazz, writing, reading, and hiking.” Past age 57, however, their interests turn toward cats, poetry, and death.

16. New Technologies and Our Feelings: Romance on the Internet, Christine Rosen, Current, June 2004

According to Rosen, “our technologies enable and often promote two detrimental forces in modern relationships: the demand for total transparency and a bias toward the oversharing of personal information.”

Would you wear a computer helmet that would let you filter out the “ever-greater intrusions by government and business” on your “personal space and freedom?” What is the cost of not having such an item?

18. Making Meaning: As Google Goes, So Goes the Nation, Geoffrey Nunberg, The New York Times, May 18, 2003

How Google ranks web sites may mislead us into thinking that what is popular is also true.

19. Conquered by Google: A Legendary Literature Quiz, Noam Cohen, The New York Times, May 1, 2005

Even the Author, of the Times Literary Supplement is falling prey to the power of Google.

UNIT 5. Societal Institutions: Law, Politics, Education, and the Military

Manufacturers are exercising increasing control over their products after they have left the store. Users gain security at the price of freedom.

22. Electronic Voting Systems: the Good, the Bad, and the Stupid, Barbara Simons, QUEUE, October 2004

After being told that electronic voting machines were inexpensive to run and reliable, election officials have had to learn something that all software developers know: “the testing and certification processes are suspect, and the software is far from bug-free.”

According to the authors, “E-voting machines potentially make electoral fraud unprecedentedly simple. An election saboteur need only introduce a small change in the master copy of the voting software to be effective.”

24. To Size Up Colleges, Students Now Shop Online, Dan Carnevale, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 2005

The same generation of students who buy jeans online “are turning out to be equally sophisticated consumers of college information.”

25. Facing Down the E-Maelstrom, Jeffrey Selingo, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 29, 2005

Never an easy job, leading a college in the age of the Internet requires sifting through email, reading blogs, and fending off criticism whose volume would be inconceivable without networked computers.

“What’s being tested in Iraq is not just the mettle of the U.S. military but an entire philosophy of warfare,” say the authors. Is it true that large numbers of land troops aren’t “always needed in an era when powerful networked-computing systems…can do much of the work?”

31. The Virus Underground, Clive Thompson, The New York Times Magazine, February 8, 2004

Clive Thompson states, “when Mario is bored…he likes to sit at his laptop and create computer viruses and worms.”

32. The Fading Memory of the State, David Talbot, Technology Review, July 2005

Government documents, from the 38 million emails generated by the Clinton administration to electronic records of the 1989 invasion of Panama, are on disintegrating electronic media, stored using now obsolete formats.

33. False Reporting on the Internet and the Spread of Rumors: Three Case Studies, Paul Hitlin, Gnovis, April 26, 2004

Internet news sources can sometimes be unreliable. Paul Hitlin examines Internet coverage of the Vince Foster suicide along with other stories to understand just why this is so.

34. The Level of Discourse Continues to Slide, John Schwartz, The New York Times, September 28, 2003

Sometimes the risks of computing are found in unlikely places. Critics complain that a slide show presentation underplayed the dangers facing the Columbia space shuttle.

UNIT 7. International Perspectives and Issues

What to do with the detritus of the digital age is a growing problem. Shipping it to China seems to be one solution.

36. The New Face of the Silicon Age, Daniel H. Pink, Wired, February 12, 2004

This piece on Indian programmers should be enough to keep chairs of American computer science departments awake at night.

37. Restoring the Popularity of Computer Science, David A. Patterson, Communications of the ACM, September 2005

While India turns out more and more programmers willing to work for a fraction of their American counterparts, enrollment in computer science across the United States is dropping. The author believes that “inaccurate impressions of opportunities” are behind the decline.

“Far from trying to regulate the Internet by merely restriction diffusion,” says Boas, “authoritarian countries such as China and Saudi Arabia are employing both technological and institutional means to control use of the Internet while also encouraging its growth.”